The new change in the Announcements

Did you notice that if the "send email immediately" box is not checked, now the body of the announcement is not in the notification email and instead there is a "View" button? The link to the View button is empty too. this is not the worst part. The fact that users have to click on view and login with their credentials to see the announcement, is a very bad design. There are so many phishing emails out there and we keep telling users not to click on links that ask for their credentials. This is a nightmare. It started since we upgraded to Q2 2018. It wasn't mentioned in the release notes either. We have a ticket for it but no update so far.

I'm annoyed with myself that I did not spot your post until now. We also found this with 2018 Q2 CU1 which we have installed on a self hosted dev environment. I've also written a post about this here: New announcement email behaviour in 2018 Q2

We have the same issue and find that the View announcement content link is 'empty' - just http:// when you view the email in Outlook Desktop (Office 2016) software but the link is there if you view the same email in Outlook in the browser (Office 365).

I reported this to Blackboard and the response was:

From our research we have come to the conclusion that this is working has designed, the new setup for these emails is expected to work in this way starting from Q2 2018.We have tested this under our test lab environments and discussed it with Tier 2 Support and unfortunately form Support side there is nothing that can be done to change this functionality.

In what regards the difference for the link in the button "View", between web Outlook and Desktop version this will need to be reviewed by your network team, since Blackboard Learn generates the link correctly (as proven by the web Outlook view), it is then changed when reaching the desktop application.

I would like to encourage you to visit our Community site where you can engage with other users and developers in order to bring new ideas into practice.

Our in-house IT team are looking into whether they can do anything about it but it will probably cause a number of problems for staff/students when they return later this month since everyone is used to receiving a copy of the announcement contents whether you tick the send immediately box or not.